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August 2016

The Donald J. Trump Referendum Democrats figure they can bait the Republican into blowing himself up.

With the party conventions wrapped up, the contours of the final 100 days of the general election are becoming clearer. The country wants change, which should help Republicans. But Democrats are confident that Hillary Clinton will win if they can make the election about Donald Trump, and Mr. Trump seems happy to oblige.

Democrats revealed in Philadelphia that they’ve decided not to make the campaign a typical left-right ideological battle. Instead, they will try to disqualify Mr. Trump as temperamentally and morally unfit for the Presidency. From now until November, expect to hear a lot about three-a.m. phone calls and nuclear winter—and on the occasional lighter note, Mr. Trump’s well-documented vulgarity.

President Obama put this strategy crisply when he noted that “what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn’t particularly Republican—and it sure wasn’t conservative.” For eight years the worst thing Mr. Obama could say about somebody is that he’s a Republican. So calling Mr. Trump worse than a conservative Republican is, for him, really harsh.

The public desire for change is nonetheless real and growing, and Democrats know that Mrs. Clinton is the least convincing “change maker” in American politics, to quote her husband’s phrase. But they have built formidable money and organizational advantages, and they figure they can win with even a candidate as flawed as Mrs. Clinton as long as 2016 is a referendum on Mr. Trump, not on the Clinton-Obama agenda or the last eight years.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump seems thrilled that Democrats are trying to make the election about his favorite subject—Donald J. Trump. Were he as shrewd a politician as he claims to be a businessman, he’d explain how Clinton-Obama policies have failed and why his would be superior. Above all, he’d work overtime to reassure undecided voters that he is a risk worth taking. He can’t tap into dissatisfaction with the status quo if Americans can’t imagine him sitting in the Oval Office.

Kashmir: New Islamic State Backed by New York Times, BBC by Vijeta Uniyal

Jihadis, trained and armed by Pakistan, are purging Kashmir of its native Hindu and Sikh population, and waging a terrorist campaign to carve out a separate Islamic country in that part of India.

What New York Times did not say is that these ‘boys with guns’ are members of Hizbul Mujahideen, a group designated as terrorist organisation by both the European Union and the United States.

After being at the forefront of gun control campaign in U.S. for decades, the New York Times finally supports ‘open carry’ – but only for terrorists waging Jihad against “infidels”.

India is not ‘occupying’ Kashmir, which is already part of India. India is waging a war against Islamic terrorism which has claimed the lives of more than 4,800 Indian civilians and more than 2400 Indian security personnel.

The mainstream media, quick to blame India for the ongoing unrest, will not tell its readers how the province of Kashmir became the Islamist hellhole that it is today.

The minarets of the mosques, reserved in times of peace for prayer calls, were proclaiming armed jihad against Hindus in towns and cities across the province. Kashmiri Hindus were given three option; either to convert to Islam, leave their ancestral homes, or face certain death.

“We order you to leave Kashmir immediately, otherwise your children will be harmed — we are not scaring you but this land is only for Muslims, and is the land of Allah. Sikhs and Hindus cannot stay here. If you do not obey, we will start with your children”. – Notice to Hindu Sikhs in Kashmir

In an ultimate act of humiliation, Hindu men were told to move out of Kashmir without taking their property or women.

Arming the police with BB guns — regardless to how dangerous the BBC or the New York Times editorial staff might consider them — is not going to put an end the aspiration of turning Kashmir into another ‘Islamic State’.

Indian security forces are again waging pitched battles with violent Islamists on the streets of the Muslim-majority province of Kashmir. Mobs began congregating in towns on July 9, after the customary Friday prayers to protest the killing the previous day by Indian security forces of a prominent Islamic terrorist, Burhan Wani. The protestors waved black ISIS flags and pelted stones at riot police. The riots have so far claimed 49 people, including 2 policeman.

UPDATE ON FRANCE BY NIDRA POLLER

UPDATE AUGUST 1

Why does it matter to get things straight, even seemingly small details? Why does it matter to say, again, that Abdelmalik Petitjean was not a flagged security risk when he got hired, through an interim employment agency, as a baggage handler at the Chambery airport? It was not a full-time job. He worked weekends. He was finishing his studies. It matters because he is not an example of flagrant negligence in the hiring of airport personnel; he’s an example of a nearly undetectable risk that was to all intents and purposes smoothly integrated into French society. He’s one more element of proof against the sociological argument about discrimination breeding resentment and sharpening the slaughterer’s knife. So, if you don’t think the free world will live or die on the toss of a coin, then you might agree that we are in the early stages of a process. And it matters how we present the facts. Democracies will learn, improve, and defend themselves. There is no reason for despair.

Abdelmalik Petitjean wasn’t an ex nihilo jihadist with nothing but the Net for inspiration His cousin, identified as 30 year-old Farid K., has been charged and imprisoned; preliminary investigations have concluded that he knew a murderous attack was imminent. Jean-Philippe J. a twenty year-old who had tried to reach the caliphate with Petitjean in June has also been charged and jailed.

Charitable Christianity

We didn’t get news this weekend, we got preached at: We will not answer hatred with hatred and violence with violence. They wish to divide us, we will stick closer together than ever. We always loved, respected, admired and hung out with our fellow men of the cloth. Now we are inseparable. The media surfed on giant waves of peace & love. We drowned in it, suffocated, strangled, choked and nothing could stop it. We were like geese stuffed to make foie gras. You would think the entire French population that would normally be reeling from an unending series of attacks and atrocities (I don’t have time or space to list the “minor” incidents that have occurred over the past month) has only one wish in its collective mind: Christian-Muslim communion. Correspondents stood in front of little churches, big mosques, majestic cathedrals, swooning over fraternity in the pulpit, in the congregation, on the doorsteps, and in the churchyards. Muslim and Christian spokesmen stood shoulder to shoulder, outdoing each other in interfaith devotion, overflowing with kindness in their hearts and in their places of worship. Some Catholic clergy went as far as merciful forgiveness for the executioners.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Turtle dove reporters cooed over the presence of “many” Muslims in the cathedral but the camera didn’t find the right angle to prove the point. A bit of truth slipped into an article in the Journal du Dimanche: the Christians at Ste. Thérèse Church in St. Etienne du Vouvray didn’t quite make it into the neighboring Yahya mosque for Friday prayers as planned. They were put off by “all those women in long black robes and the men with long beards.” The service was led by Abdellatif Hmito, the imam from Oissel, known for his eloquence in French, in the absence of the mosque’s regularly officiating imam, who does not speak French at all.

Adel Kermiche was the black sheep of a respectable family. His older sister is a surgeon, all his siblings have degrees and successful careers. His mother is a teacher. There has been no mention of a father. Though the family does not worship at the mosque, the mother sought help for her radicalized son. Mosque president, Mohammed Karabila, regrets that he had to curtail his deradicalization efforts because of a lack of subsidies.

EUROPE’S SUMMER OF TERROR BY JED BABBIN

Foreshadowing what will happen here more and more often.

David Fisher’s magnificent book, A Summer Bright and Terrible, begins with the sentence, “In England the summer of 1940 was the sunniest, driest, most glorious summer in living memory.” But in that summer — the summer of the Battle of Britain — the only things that stood between the death and survival of European civilization were the few fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force and the personal courage of Winston Churchill.

Today there is no Churchill and the battle for civilization can’t be won in the skies over England. The new enemy of European civilization, Islamism and the Islamic terrorism it propels, are as great a threat as that posed 76 years ago by Nazism.

This is Europe’s summer of terror. There have been seven terrorist attacks since June. In France alone, there have been fourteen Islamic terrorist attacks in the past two years killing at least two hundred and forty people. The last one, so far, was the 26 July attack in which two ISIS terrorists killed an 85-year-old priest near Rouen, France.

In Germany, the attacks are increasing and the Germans are hell-bent on ignoring the attackers’ obvious motivations. In late July when a gunman killed nine near a shopping mall in Munich, shouting the Muslim battle cry “Allahu Akbar,” German authorities claimed not to know the motivation of the attacker, a German-Iranian.

EDWARD CLINE: WE DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW

Let’s now turn to the deliberate manipulation or obfuscation or suppression of official reporting on crimes committed by “migrants” (aka Muslims) in the U.S. and in Europe,such as the recent rape of a 5-year-old girl in Idaho by “underage” Muslim boys in Idaho.

Davis Odell, a community resident who has been in close contact with the victim’s family said the boys dragged the unnamed girl into a utility room in the Fawnbrook Apartments, a low-income, subsidized housing complex in Twin Falls, and assaulted her in an attack that ended when a neighbor happened upon the scene and called police….

Twin Falls Police Chief Craig Kingsbury told reporters the suspects are Iraqi and Sudanese. [County Prosecutor Grant] Loebs said he does not know how long they have been living in the United States.

Twin Falls activists say the case and the lack of information from authorities demonstrates the problem with state and federal programs to resettle refugees in cities and towns.

The local police hemmed and hawed about the character of the crime and dragged their feet on the exact identity of the perpetrators. Residents brow-beat the chief of police, but it was clear that the police were under higher authority pressure to not be forthcoming with the truth lest it reflect badly on “migrants” resettled at the behest of the Obama administration. Shades of the Rotherham sex slave and prostitution ring in Britain, a ring that was run for years with impunity by Muslims.IPT reported that “Between 1997 and 2013, well before the recent mass migration to Europe began, an estimated 1,400 children had been sexually abused in Rotherham, England, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men.”

At a City Council meeting Monday night, residents demanded answers from law enforcement regarding the crime and the resettlement program, with some calling for the removal of all immigrants in the city.

RUTHIE BLUM: ISIS IS ONLY ONE STRAIN OF JIHAD

On Sunday, the U.K.’s Daily Mirror alerted its readers to the latest edition of Dabiq, the multilingual digital magazine uploaded periodically by the Islamic State terrorist organization. The current issue, the publication’s 15th since its inception in 2014, is titled “Break the Cross,” an apt description of the group’s systematic subjugation and slaughter of Christians.

One of the articles in the latest edition — “Why we hate you and want to fight you” — lists six reasons for the destruction of the West:

1. “We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah — whether you realize it or not — by making partners for him in worship; you blaspheme against him, claiming that he has a son; you fabricate lies against his prophets and messengers; and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices.”

2. “We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things he has permitted, a matter that doesn’t concern you because you separate between religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the legislators you vote into power.”

3. “In the case of the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage war against you because you disbelieve in the existence of your lord and creator.”

4. “We hate you for your crimes against Islam and wage war against you to punish you for your transgressions against our religion.”

5. “We hate you for your crimes against the Muslims; your drones and fighter jets bomb, kill and maim our people around the world; and your puppets in the usurped lands of the Muslims oppress, torture and wage war against anyone who calls to the truth.”

6. “We hate you for invading our lands and fight you to repel you and drive you out. As long as there is an inch of territory left for us to reclaim, jihad will continue to be a personal obligation on every single Muslim.”

Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People By Rod Dreher

I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.

This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the final question I asked after Trump’s convention speech) shows why.

RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.

J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.

What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below). Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.

From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.

The last point I’ll make about Trump is this: these people, his voters, are proud. A big chunk of the white working class has deep roots in Appalachia, and the Scots-Irish honor culture is alive and well. We were taught to raise our fists to anyone who insulted our mother. I probably got in a half dozen fights when I was six years old. Unsurprisingly, southern, rural whites enlist in the military at a disproportionate rate. Can you imagine the humiliation these people feel at the successive failures of Bush/Obama foreign policy? My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself: I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.

Communists and Muslims: The Hidden Hand of the KGB! Posted by Jake Martinez

Posted on Lenin and Sharia-By Cliff Kincaid-On July 19, 2012:

These are only excerpts from this eye-opening presentation because of its overall length
Konstantin Preobrazhensky, former KGB intelligence officer and author of several books on Russia. His white paper, Communists and Muslims: The Hidden Hand of the KGB.

“Introduction by

I am pleased to present Konstantin Preobrazhensky’s insightful treatment of the radical Muslim problem, in connection with how the communists, in particular the Russians, are using or exploiting them. Much of this influence stems from the operations of the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, which continues under a different name. A former KGB officer, Preobrazhensky fled to the U.S. in 2003 and received political asylum in March 2006. His bio tells the full story of his efforts to expose the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, and its successor.

In this report, he discusses a peculiar phenomenon – those with Muslim names and communist hearts. Or, as Frank Gaffney has put it, Sharia is “Communism with a God.” This seemingly paradoxical problem is real and has been exported by the Soviet Union as part of the communist world revolution.

I first came into contact with Preobrazhensky when I was writing about the “Arab Spring.” As the leader of Tunisia was forced into exile, I noticed that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist–Leninist organization founded in 1967, issued a statement declaring, “These popular upsurges are shaking the ground in the Arab world and posing a new and powerful challenge to U.S. imperialism, Zionism, and the Arab regimes which have enabled them by trampling upon their own people for decades.” It said that “the Arab masses were capable of making great and revolutionary change, as we are witnessing today, and which has already achieved great results in Tunisia.”

The PFLP is part of the PLO and has a long-time association with the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB. The group earned a reputation for spectacular international attacks, including airline hijackings, which killed at least 20 U.S. citizens. The statement by the PFLP about turmoil in the Middle East was a reminder that a terrorist group associated with the Soviet Union is still in existence, active, and prepared to take advantage of world unrest and troubles.

Because of our work in exposing the Al-Jazeera television network, we found it interesting that the Muslim Brotherhood, which effectively controls the network and brags about it, gave rise to terrorist organizations such as Hamas, officially designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department. However, the Muslim Brotherhood is not an officially designated FTO. This has enabled the Obama Administration to literally embrace the organization, which has taken power in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood wants Egypt to unilaterally open the border with Gaza, a move that would facilitate arms shipments to Hamas and increase military pressure on Israel. A Congressional Research Service report noted, “Egypt sealed the border out of concern for the possibly destabilizing effects of Hamas’s relations with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which the government of President Mubarak considers a threat.” President Obama encouraged the overthrow of Mubarak, a long-time American ally.

The Theological Compromise For Terror By Herbert London

President, London Center for Policy Research

In a commonly told Israeli joke or aphorism, two taxi drivers come to an impasse on a single road. The first driver says move aside so I can pass; the second driver says the same. Emotions explode. After hurling insults, the first driver leaves his cab with fists flailing. He sees a Jew seated in the back of his rival’s taxi and proceeds to beat him up. The second driver upset by what he observed, gets out of his cab and heads for his rival’s taxi. Quite coincidentally, there is also a Jewish passenger in the back seat and he too is beaten up. What is the moral of this story?

Assume for a moment, the drivers are Sunni and Shia. In the story they are rivals, but most notably they are united in their hatred of Jews. The Middle East assumption that religious differences will lead to fragmentation and a stalemate between Sunni and Shia is a fiction since both sides have a common enemy and a common goal: Removing the U.S. and Israel from the Middle East.

Recently the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned members of al Qaeda who are based in Iran. What journalist Armin Rosen pointed out is that the Shia dominated regime doesn’t care about sectarian differences with Sunnis as long as al Qaeda bogs down the U.S. on every battle front in the Middle East.

Iran’s ties with al Qaeda have been well known and documented since 2011. According to the 9/11 Commission report, “Eight of the fourteen Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives (in the attacks) traveled into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.” After the 9/11 attacks, several members of bin Laden’s family sought sanctuary in Iran.

For Iran, terrorism comes first. It has been known for a considerable period that Iran is the primary sponsor of Hezbollah (a Shia terrorist group) and has assisted Hamas (a Sunni terrorist organization). The common principle they share is inflicting violence on and in Israel.